North Carolina got cold shoulder from `Cold Mountain'

Mark Bixler, Cox New ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The real Cold Mountain rises 6,030 feet above sea level in western North Carolina, a rugged peak clad in mountain laurel and huckleberries.

The movie "Cold Mountain" opened nationwide on Christmas amid critical acclaim and high hopes from a studio that gambled more than $80 million on the production. Set mainly in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the 1860s but filmed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, "Cold Mountain" recounts the pilgrimage of a wounded Confederate deserter who slogs across North Carolina toward the promise of a lover waiting in the hills.

The movie's debut stirs a blend of contradictions among those who live near the real mountain.

People like Frank Sorrells, a 75-year-old retired teacher who farms 33 acres at the base of Cold Mountain, do not understand why a movie set in Cold Mountain, N.C., was filmed in the Romanian province of Transylvania.

"It don't seem right," he said.

Key players in North Carolina's burgeoning moviemaking industry say they worked for five years with the film's director, Anthony Minghella, and his crew, scouting locations around the mountains.

Seventy-eight feature films and television shows were filmed in the Tarheel State in 2002, generating $231 million in revenue, and the industry has grown so quickly that various estimates rank North Carolina third in revenue from film production, behind California and New York.

Having "Cold Mountain" filmed in the state would have provided a big economic boost, said Bill Arnold, the state's film commissioner.

He said contacts at the production company, Miramax, told him they chose Romania mainly because it costs much less to film in Eastern Europe than in western North Carolina.

Romanian landscape

Arnold also said rural Romania shows fewer signs of modern life, such as telephone poles, power lines and paved roads, and it boasts guaranteed snowfall--a must for the movie's climactic scenes. A few inches of snow blanketed Cold Mountain last week, but snow is inconsistent and unpredictable in North Carolina's mountains.

As for wounded pride, the film commissioner acknowledges that it stings to see a story set in the southern Appalachians filmed overseas. Yet Arnold tempers his indignation, noting that about 95 percent of 600 feature films and countless television shows made in North Carolina since 1980 were set somewhere else.

Before the 1997 publication of the novel "Cold Mountain," by North Carolina native Charles Frazier, only bear hunters and hard-core hikers cared much about the peaks. The book, which won a National Book Award and spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, generated a modest increase in tourism, but businesses expect more as a result of the movie, starring Oscar contenders Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Jude Law.

Already it has drawn Bill Park, a 51-year-old agricultural economics professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and his son, Daniel, 21, a student at Clemson University.

They drove from Knoxville to Waynesville this week, followed N.C. State Road 276 south for a few miles, turned onto a winding two-lane mountain road and stopped at last at the Daniel Boone Scout Camp.

To the left loomed the trail up Cold Mountain, in the Shining Rock Wilderness Area of Pisgah National Forest, about 25 miles southwest of Asheville.

Rangers warn against ascending Cold Mountain without a map and compass. It's a steep and strenuous 10.4-mile round-trip hike.

Bill Park said he read the book a few years ago, and the two decided to visit Cold Mountain after seeing trailers for the movie.

"I was wondering if it would be crowded because of the movie," Daniel Park said.

It wasn't, but that may change.

Selling hype of locale

Dale Carroll, chief executive officer of an economic development organization called Advantage West North Carolina, said a representative of the group plans to go to travel industry shows in England and Scotland in the next two months to market the North Carolina mountains to Europeans who saw "Cold Mountain."

But someone close to the real history behind the movie has little use for all the hype.

Like Frazier, Ted Darrell Inman is descended from the Confederate soldier, William Pinkney Inman, who inspired the novel's main character. An amateur historian, he has spent a lifetime documenting the Inman family.

Ted Darrell Inman said he has gleaned a few things about his great-great uncle from the historical record: He was 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, had dark hair and did, in fact, desert from the Confederate army during the Civil War. Twice.

Inman lives down from the Inman Chapel Church, started in 1902 by one of William Pinkney Inman's brothers. It has 13 wooden pews and a framed picture of its founder on one wall.

Not far away is a cemetery where Ted Darrell Inman says his ancestor lies in an unmarked grave next to his father.

He points to a patch of grass.

"Pinkney Inman's buried right here, according to the preacher," he said.

The amateur historian wants the world to know that Inman was a real person and that his descendants "are real people--educated, hard-working mountain people. We're not a bunch of hicks."

He has not read the novel and does not plan to see the movie. The "Frazier boy," as he calls the novel's author, may care for made-up stories, but not him.

"My mind don't have room for history and fiction combined," Inman said. "I'm not interested in nothing but the facts."